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February 2019

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Thiessen: The Left Jumps To Believe Anti-Trump Stories Due To Contempt For Trump, Trump Supporters Posted By Ian Schwartz

By on February 21st, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/02/21/thiessen_the_left_jumps_to_believe_anti-trump_stories_due_to_contempt_for_trump_trump_supporters.html

Conservative columnist Marc Thiessen opined on the pattern of news organizations and the political left rushing to judgment on stories that reflect poorly on President Trump and his supporters. From Wednesday’s edition of ‘Special Report’ on FOX News:

MARC THIESSEN, COLUMNIST: There is a pattern here. First, it was the Covington kids that everyone jumped to believe because they were wearing MAGA hats they were some sort of racists and now they are suing some of the news organizations who falsely reported the story.

Now there is this rush to believe Jussie Smollett because he said he was attacked in Chicago by people yelling this is “This is MAGA country” because we all know that Chicago is MAGA country. You had Cory Booker and Kamala Harris who both said this is a modern day lynching. Pelosi who said it was an attack on humanity.

These people jumped to believe him. And why is that? Because it exposes the fact that the political left in Washington has contempt not just for Donald Trump, but for Donald Trump’s supporters. They assume that Donald Trump’s supporters are racist even though 7 to 8 million Trump voters voted twice for Barack Obama.

What happened in the 2016 election is that millions of Americans who are not being listened to by the establishments of either party asserted themselves through the democratic process and instead of listening to them and taking them seriously, they continue to believe that these people are racists and bigots and have to be shunned. And that’s what we’ve seen in both of these cases.

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Jussie Smollett’s Hate By E.W. Jackson

By on February 21st, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/jussie_smolletts_hate.html

Conservative pundits have pointed out that Democrat elites and the so-called “mainstream” media were quick to accept actor Jussie Smollett’s story of being assaulted by two Trump-supporters.

It is clear now that he lied. Smollett said his attackers were white and that he would have been believed without question if his assailants had been “Muslim,” “Mexican,” or “black.” They were black.

When asked why he thinks this happened, Smollett answered, “I have gone hard against 45, I have gone hard against this administration.” The mainstream media were all too happy to embrace any story that promotes their belief that President Trump and his supporters are racist and “homophobic.”

However, Smollett and the leftist media have a broader focus for their hatred than this president. They hate America. The alleged Smollett attack was designed not merely to prove that this president and his supporters are bigots, but to demonstrate once again that America is a hateful place where racism and homophobia run rampant.

The president’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is interpreted as code language for “make America white again.” His opposition to illegal immigration is depicted as a racist ploy to keep nonwhite people out of the country. They know that President Trump is not the originator of what they see as America’s sordid legacy of hatred and bigotry, but in their minds, he is its latest and best representative.

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Palestinians: “The Slap of the Century” by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on February 21st, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13787/palestinians-slap-of-the-century

Under the current circumstances, when Arabs are being widely shamed and condemned for sitting in the same room with an Israeli prime minister, it is hard to see how the Trump administration will be able to convince Arab states and leaders to normalize their relations with Israel. Some of these Arab leaders may be privately telling US administration officials things they like to hear about peace and coexistence with Israel. The very same leaders, however, are fully aware of the opposite sentiments, not only in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but throughout the Arab world.

All that is left for the Trump administration to do is to try and persuade the Arab states to abandon the Palestinians, and to continue focusing on the regional threat from Iran. If the US completes its pullout from Syria, Iran will successfully complete its long-desired “land-bridge” to the Mediterranean through Yemen, Syria and Lebanon. This encirclement of the area will position Iran, via its proxies, to be the hegemon controlling the region, as it has clearly been trying to bring about. Russia, of course, is standing in the wings, thanks to the gift that then US President Barack Obama handed Putin in 2011 by pulling American troops out of Syria.

For decades now, not only Palestinian leaders but Arab ones as well, have been radicalizing their people against Israel. Using every available platform, including mosques, media outlets and United Nations organizations, these leaders, with the collaboration of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, have demonized Israel. They have poisoned the hearts and minds of their people with the hate that exists towards Israel all over the Arab world. To promote normalization with Israel, a leader must prepare his people for the possibility of peace with Israel. Meanwhile, Arab leaders are doing the exact opposite — which is why some of them are currently being denounced as traitors and pawns in the hands of Israel and the US. It would be wise for President Trump’s advisers, if they wish to grasp what is really going on in the Arab world, to listen to the voices of the Arab street.

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Turkey: Uniting an “Army of Islam” to Defeat Just One Country by Uzay Bulut

By on February 21st, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13559/turkey-army-of-islam

At the conference, Adnan Tanriverdi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s top military advisor, delivered a speech detailing the inner workings of the “Islamic Confederal State” that Tanriverdi’s Strategic Research Center for Defenders of Justice (ASSAM) aims to establish with 61 Muslim countries.

Judging by an article Tanriverdi penned in 2009, the purpose of this joint Islamic force is to defeat Israel, which “should be made to get engaged [in war] and the length of the war should be extended.”

Erdogan and his chief military advisor are obviously engaging in projection. It is Turkey that has ethnically cleansed itself of Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians, and that is now targeting Syrian Kurds. It is the Turkish government’s continued aggression against various peoples in Israel, Syria, Iraq, Cyprus and other countries that is a threat to world peace; not Israel. It is Turkey, not Israel, whose destabilizing foreign policy needs to change.

Istanbul recently hosted the second “International Islamic Union Congress,” sponsored mainly by the Strategic Research Center for Defenders of Justice (ASSAM), which is headed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s chief military advisor, Adnan Tanriverdi, a retired lieutenant general and an Islamist .

At the conference, Tanriverdi delivered a speech detailing the inner workings of the “Islamic Confederal State” that ASSAM aims to establish with 61 Muslim countries. In his address, Tanriverdi said that a “rapid deployment force” should be created. Judging by an article Tanriverdi penned in 2009, the purpose of this joint Islamic force is to defeat Israel, which “should be made to get engaged [in war] and the length of the war should be extended.”

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Changing Reality With Words By Victor Davis Hanson

By on February 21st, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/20/changing

The reinvention of vocabulary can often be more effective than any social protest movement. Malarial swamps can become healthy “wetlands.” Fetid “dumps” are often rebranded as green “landfills.”

Global warming was once a worry about too much heat. It implied that man-made carbon emissions had so warmed the planet that life as we knew it would soon be imperiled without radical changes in consumer lifestyles.

Yet in the last 30 years, record cold spells, inordinate snow levels and devastating rains have been common. How to square that circle?

Substitute “climate change” for global warming. Presto! Any radical change in weather could be perceived as symptomatic of too much climate-changing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Suddenly, blizzards, deluges and subzero temperatures meant that typically unpredictable weather was “haywire” because of affluent Westernized lifestyles.

Affirmative action originated as a means of making up for past prejudices against the African-American community, which comprised about 12 percent of the population.

By the late 1960s, slavery, Jim Crow and institutionalized segregation were finally considered unique stains on the American past, to be redeemed in the present by set-aside programs in college admissions and hiring predicated on racial considerations.

The problem with affirmative action is that the very name implied redress for historical wrongs that could be “affirmed” by compensatory action for a particular minority of the population. But lots of other groups wished to be included in an ever-expanding catalog of the oppressed.

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A Fine and Dangerous Madness By Michael Walsh

By on February 21st, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/20/a-fine-and

To make sense of the recent spate of hysteria on the Left, it helps to understand how their minds work—or, as they like say, connect the dots. The shortest route between an isolated instance (Jussie Smollett, John Wayne) and a knee-jerk cry of racism, sexism or some other pet -ism is from one neuron to the one directly adjacent to it in a progressive’s brain. Every event, even ones faked or misleadingly reported, must have both a political cause and a coercive resolution: the Narrative demands it. Amplified by social media, it’s driving us all mad.

Any random weather event can trigger cries of the apocalypse from the likes of Al Gore or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A putative but wholly implausible attack during the sub-zero arctic chill of a Chicago late night instantly is seized upon as proof of America’s incorrigible (and thus de-legitimizing) racial prejudice. A wrongly interpreted word, or gesture, or smile, even the use of a personal pronoun, is cause for alarm, insults, or legal action. J’accuse! has become the national motto as the Twitter tumbrels roll. Heads dutifully roll into the baskets as the Madame Defarges of the media click their knitting needles and fashion the next installment of the Narrative tapestry.

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A Citizen Suing the Department of Justice Needs More than Just a Winning Legal Argument By Sharyl Attkisson

By on February 21st, 2019

How the deck is stacked against citizens who think the government derives its power from us.

As I fight on with my computer intrusion lawsuit against the U.S. government, it seems to intersect more clearly with current events every day. And it points to an even larger story.

How widespread is improper government surveillance of journalists, politicians and other U.S. citizens in the name of the fight against terrorism? A few of us found out we were targeted only because we were lucky enough to be alerted by inside sources or other unique ways. How many others were targeted, monitored and watched by government officials but still have no idea it happened?

Who is behind the move to use government surveillance tools against innocent Americans? Do some of these officials still work inside the government? Were some of them the very same officials now implicated in alleged surveillance abuses during Campaign 2016?

The Case

In late January, an appeals court heard oral arguments in my federal lawsuit, now entering its fourth year. A panel of three judges will determine what happens next. Here are several possible outcomes:

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Fighting in the Trenches of This Culture War For a Canadian “Festival of Literary Diversity,” some cultures are more equal than others. Howard Rotberg

By on February 21st, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272914/fighting-trenches-culture-war-howard-rotberg

For over 15 years, I have been operating a small publishing house, which is Canada’s sole conservative and pro-Israel publishing house. We publish some of the greatest Canadian, American and international authors who support fundamental freedoms, liberty, justice and individual rights as opposed to group rights. Our authors generally oppose cultural and moral relativism, and for that reason they are generally shunned by leftist publishing houses who naively believe that all cultures are equal.

I am the son of a Holocaust survivor who lost his parents and then eight-year-old sister in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. When someone tells me that all cultures are equal, I ask if the person believes that the culture of Nazi Germany or of ISIS is equal to the culture of Canada or the United States. The person usually walks away at that point.

Recently, as part of my publishing duties and the need to see if there are any upcoming opportunities for our authors to speak, I came across an event near Toronto called the Festival of Literary Diversity. Looking at the photographs of the 20 or so authors speaking or appearing, I could see that almost all were brown or black and they were mostly women.

Mantua Books also publishes brown women (Farzana Hassan, The Case Against Jihad), brown men (Professor Salim Mansur, Delectable Lie: a liberal repudiation of multiculturalism and Islamism and the Qur’an Problem), as well as white Jewish women, aged Christian men, gay Jewish men, all what we might term “conservative” thinkers, but who are actually “classically liberal” as much as conservative.

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What Taxing the Rich Did to Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s States They wrecked Massachusetts and New York, now they want to wreck America. Daniel Greenfield

By on February 21st, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272867/what-taxing-rich-did-elizabeth-warren-and-daniel-greenfield

Tax time is usually an unhappy time for taxpayers, but a joyous time for government employees and the welfare class that gets more in “refunds” than it ever pays in taxes.

But this year, tax time is a depressing time for the taxmasters in the big blue states.

Blue states use high taxes to finance their frivolous spending. But this year, the money just isn’t there even as House and Senate lefties from big blue states tout new plans to soak the rich.

Senator Elizabeth Warren made headlines by building her 2020 campaign around a “wealth tax”.

Warren called it, “the ‘Ultra-Millionaire Tax” and claimed that it only “applies to that tippy top 0.1% – those with a net worth of over $50 million”. That’s convenient because the millionaire class warrior’s own estimated net worth tops out at around $10 million. When millionaires like Elizabeth Warren talk about taxing wealth, they mean the wealth of the millionaires who are wealthier than they are.

But over in Warren’s Taxachusetts, soaking the rich isn’t keeping the blue state model afloat.

Massachusetts experienced a January tax revenue shortfall of $195 million. That’s down 6% from 2018. And January is the cold, snowy month that is meant to account for 10% of the revenues for the year.

December was none too cheerful either.

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To the Moon! SpaceX to Launch Israeli Lunar Lander (and More) on Thursday By Elizabeth Howell

By on February 21st, 2019

https://www.space.com/spacex-to-launch-israeli-moon-lander.html?utm_source=notification

SpaceX will launch an Israeli robotic lunar lander during the company’s Falcon 9 rocket launch tomorrow (Feb. 21). If the lander succeeds, this will be the first privately funded moonshot to reach the lunar surface.

The lander, called “Beresheet” (in the beginning), will launch at 8:45 p.m. EST (0145 GMT, Feb. 22) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. You can watch the launch live on Space.com courtesy of SpaceX or directly through SpaceX’s webcast page or on Facebook via the lander’s creators.

The Beresheet lander is a joint venture between Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL — one of the participants in the Google Lunar X Prize, which challenged companies to land spacecraft on the moon — and Israel Aerospace Industries, the country’s largest aerospace and defense company. [Israel’s 1st Moon Lander: SpaceIL’s Beresheet Lunar Mission in Pictures]

While the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize challenge ended with no winner in 2018, several participating companies said they are continuing work on their concepts. The SpaceIL project will be the first of those designs to launch, and Israel now has a shot at becoming the fourth country to land a robotic probe on the moon — after the former Soviet Union, the United States and China.

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